On Monday, January 30, the judge in ITT’s bankruptcy granted former ITT students’ request that they be recognized as having filed a group claim despite the trustee’s objection, and recognized the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School as students’ counsel for this initial stage of their case. Former ITT students requested this group recognition as part of their initial filing on January 3. Although the trustee for ITT’s estate filed a vigorous objection to the former students’ request, Judge Carr agreed with the former students that it was unquestionably appropriate to permit former students to file their claims as a group, rather than individually. The judge ordered the trustee to meet with the students’ lawyers to begin discussing the issue of class certification in students’ adversary proceeding against ITT’s estate.

The judge also denied—for now—the trustee’s motion to hire a company as a “master servicer,” to supervise ongoing collections by UAS and FirstSource, and to begin collecting on more accounts. Former students objected to this request, arguing that, by undertaking a broad new debt collection campaign on fraudulently-incurred and otherwise poorly-documented debts, the trustee would confuse former students and expose ITT’s estate to liability for collecting bad debts. The Trustee disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had also warned that collecting on ITT’s accounts was likely to cause future legal problems, and acknowledged that many of the accounts were likely not collectible. The trustee argued that the estate should nonetheless be allowed to hire the firm as master servicer, but Judge Carr denied the request for now, ordering the lawyers for the trustee to meet with lawyers for former students to discuss their positions on continuing debt collection against former ITT students.

The court scheduled a status conference with former students and the Trustee on February 9 to discuss both of these topics.

“It seems only right that victims of predatory for-profit education companies should have their student loans forgiven,” the article begins. It goes on to discuss the validity of students’ claims, their difficulty in getting debt relief, and the thousand of pages of “powerful testimony” submitted with the students’ complaint. As the article explains, the evidence shows “a pattern of practice that dispels any notion that bad behavior harmed just a handful of ITT students.”

The Project on Predatory Student Lending of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and Public Justice asked a federal judge on Friday, December 16, for access to documents that are likely to reveal for-profit college giant Education Management Corporation (EDMC)’s recruitment practices.

A few years ago, the federal government, along with several states, sued EDMC, whose four large chains of for-profit schools include the beleaguered Art Institutes, alleging that it violated state and federal law and then lied about it to get government funding. The government claimed that EDMC illegally paid its recruiters based on the number of students they could enroll, a practice prohibited by federal law. EDMC, the government alleged, “created a ‘boiler room’ style sales culture,” the “relentless and exclusive focus” of which was “the number of new students” each recruiter could sign up. To maximize enrollments, the lawsuit alleged, EDMC taught its recruiters to exploit prospective students’ vulnerabilities, and rewarded those who recruited the most students with bonuses, extra time off, vacations, and gifts.

Former students of the Art Institutes and other EDMC-owned chains want these documents to help prove that they were defrauded, and are entitled to relief on their student loans. Because these documents have so far been kept secret—and because EDMC uses forced arbitration clauses to drive students out of the public court system—borrowers seeking debt relief often have little but their own personal experiences to corroborate their claims of misconduct.

“While taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding what the Department of Justice has called EDMC’s ‘recruitment mill,’ the borrowers who attended these schools have yet to obtain federal debt relief,” said Public Justice attorney Jennifer Bennett.

Before filing this lawsuit, the Project tried to get these documents showing EDMC’s predatory recruitment practices through federal and state freedom of information requests, but its request was denied in part because of a protective order in the case. The Project asked a federal judge to rule that the protective order does not shield the documents.

The Project on Predatory Student Lending fights for low-income borrowers, representing students and families who have experienced unfair, deceptive, and illegal conduct at the hands of for-profit colleges. In addition to litigating on behalf of its clients, the Project has advocated for policy reforms to increase accountability in the for-profit industry.

About Public Justice

Public Justice pursues high impact lawsuits to combat social and economic injustice, protect the Earth’s sustainability, and challenge predatory corporate conduct and government abuses. For two decades, Public Justice has been exposing and preventing excessive secrecy in our nation’s courts. Public Justice has unsealed evidence of dangers to public health and safety, helped injury victims oppose over-broad protective orders, and educated the public about the dangers of litigation conducted behind closed doors.

On January 3, 2017, a group of former ITT Tech students moved to intervene in ITT’s bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of Indiana. They seek to act as representatives of hundreds of thousands who have been defrauded by ITT.

Along with legal documents, the students filed over a thousand pages of first-hand accounts from students who attended ITT, affidavits from several whistleblowers, and evidence developed from state and federal law enforcement investigations. The CFPB and multiple state attorneys general are also parties in the bankruptcy proceedings.

For more information on the student intervention, including all of the documents that were filed, background on ITT, and explanations of the legal actions taken today, click here.

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